Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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Like my brownhouse:
   shouldn't concern a developer
Wednesday, October 20 2021
Yesterday I'd thought my SSL certificate woes were behind me, and that included on Gretchen's computer, where Chrome has been increasingly throwing errors about legitimate sites. I'd forgotten to mention that last evening I'd managed to export all the trusted certificates from my new Windows-10-based Woodchuck to a file (the system demanded a password, so I used "1" for that) and then I'd imported that file into Gretchen's Windows-7-based computer. This was an easy procedure and fixed all the SSL errors I knew about. (Strangely, no one suggested doing this anywhere on the Web; perhaps there is a reason not to.)
But I was wrong; my SSL problems were far from over. When I went to compile the cursed Angular frontend for the sprawling application that has devoured nearly two years of my professional life, it was once more throwing SSL errors from port 4200 (that is, from the web server that is built in to either Angular or Node). After hours of experiments (punctuated, as always, by concentration-killing compilations, I managed to fix the SSL certificate problems on port 4200, but in so doing I'd somehow broken SSL on port 443 (the one served by Microsoft's IIS server). The problem with trying to debug such issues is that sometimes you can break or fix something and not see the effects until after restarting a process or rebooting, though the documentation is muddy about what causes such delayed effects. It's normal to have to reboot Windows to see changes to things (it's one of the things that makes it still seem a little like a toy operating system), but rebooting isn't always necessary. (This sort of thing is also what bedevils debugging problems with connection strings and other data stored in System or User variables.) At some point I rebooted my laptop and most of the certificate problems went away, though by then it wasn't clear which step had fixed what. And now Angular could no longer connect to the backend because of some sort of SSL problem that I just couldn't fix. (I suspected that I needed to somehow tell Angular's web server that the certificate I was using really truly was okay, but there was no obvious way to do this.) It's amazing how long I spend dealing with issues that really shouldn't concern a developer working in the safety of a single machine. There should be some simple setting to ignore all such problems so I can focus on the tasks that I know something about: writing code. Computer security doesn't interest me at all, and everything I know about it I've learned by being forced up against various problems (as I've been going on about for several days).

The day ended up being a gorgeous one, so I drove with the dogs in the Prius to Woodstock to meet Gretchen for dinner. [REDACTED]
The Garden is closed on Wednesday, and I was more in the mood for semi-authentic Mexican food anyway, so we went to the Bear Cantina in Bearsville. They have a beautiful outdoor dining area along the the Saw Kill, so that was where we sat. I ordered the tofu fajitas, and they were pretty good, especially with the habañero sauce I asked for, though there was far too much habañero sauce and far too few soft corn tortillas given all the things to put in them. Our meal ended abruptly when Gretchen got a phone call from someone reminding her of a Zoom call she had spaced out on, already more than a half hour underway. She zipped back to Hurley in the Prius, stopping just long enough to let me out in Woodstock so I could drive home in the Bolt. Sadly, the dogs never got a chance to run around in a parking lot or sit under our table as we ate.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211020

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